“Don’t strain yourself.” I was always suspicious of people who made a point of proclaiming their honesty.
Leaning forward, Bourke slapped my shoulder heartily and laughed with his teeth. “No strain, I’m leveling with you, don’t get me wrong. I haven’t laid an eye on Molly this year. I broke with her and Lemp at the same time, for the same reason. I’ll even tell you the reason.” He looked sideways in surprise at his own generous candor. “They were using the leads Lemp got working for me, to run a little sideshow of their own.”
“Blackmail?”
“It boiled down to that. I get a lot of jealous wives in here.” He sniffed with distaste, as if female emotions had left traces in the room. “A fair percentage of them have nothing to be jealous about. It’s my job to set their minds at rest as soon as I can. Art Lemp was assigned to two or three of these cases. He played them the opposite way, for maximum trouble – a variation on the badger game. Twice that I know about, he maneuvered the husband into a compromising position with Molly, once in a car, once in a hotel room. Then this photographer pal of his took a picture. One of the suckers bought the picture from Lemp. What would you do if you had a jealous wife? The other one came to me. That was the day I kicked Art Lemp downstairs.” A reminiscent smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. “I phoned Molly and gave her a tongue-lashing, and I haven’t seen her since, either. If it wasn’t so bad for business, I’d have marched the two of them down to the station-house.”
“Where was Molly living in December?”
“I don’t know where she lived.”
“Try her phone number.”
“I never knew her phone number.”
“You said you phoned her.”
“Through a friend,” he said, with an explanatory lifting of the hands. “She had an arrangement with this friend of hers to handle her phone calls for her.”
“Her friend should know where she is.”
“That I doubt. The friend in question is serving time in the L.A. County Jail. The Vice Squad put her away in January. Maybe they got Molly, too. I couldn’t care less.”
“Lemp had a nice circle of friends,” I said, thinking that Bourke had, too. “What about the photographer you mentioned, the one that took the compromising pictures?”
“I never met him. I’d have fixed him if I had. Don’t even know his name.”
“Or where he lived?”
“I think he lived in the same hotel with Lemp, one of those crummy joints downtown. That was where they took one of the pictures.”
“The Sunset Hotel?”
“You’re getting psychic, Howard.”
“The car Lemp was killed in belonged to a Kerry Smith, who gave the Sunset Hotel as his address. Does the name Kerry Smith mean anything to you?”
“Not a thing. If he’s the flashbulb boy, he probably isn’t there any more. Lemp checked out in December, the day I gave him the stairs treatment. Flashbulb probably went along with him.”
“You have no description of the photographer?”
“Not a thing,” he repeated. “I can give you a good one of Molly Fawn, if you want. Fawn isn’t her real name, incidentally – just a stage name.”
“Is she an actress?”
“They’re all actresses, Howard. Every female bum in town is an actress, if all they did was gallop in the second line of a third-rate nitery in San Francisco. Just like half the male bums call themselves artists and writers. And private investigators.” He smiled wryly.
“Molly’s description,” I reminded him.
“You’ve seen a hundred of her, Howard, maybe a thousand in your work. Well-turned little blonde, of course not natural blonde, height about five foot four, weight about one twenty-five, good legs but they could be better. Claims to be nineteen or twenty. One thing, if you catch up with her, don’t believe anything she says. She’s a psychopathic liar. They’re all psychopathic liars. I know, I’m married to one.”
“You could be prejudiced. Color of eyes?”
“Pansy-purple, I mean the flower. Her eyes are her best feature, and she knows it. Uses them all the time, on everything in trousers.”
“Distinguishing characteristics?”
“None that I know of. She has a very good skin. Funny thing about her, she doesn’t tan.” His voice dropped meditatively. “Funny thing.”
On the desk behind him, the phone rang in sharp remonstrance. Bourke pivoted and lifted the receiver. “Carol? Is that you, baby?”
It wasn’t Carol.
“Yes, Mr. Forest,” he said. “This is Bourke speaking. Yes, I run the Acme agency.”
He answered a series of questions about Art Lemp, and then my name came up. Bourke handed me the receiver. “F.B.I. man, wants to talk to you.”
Forest’s voice came rasping over the long wire. “You’ve got the jump on us, I see. Don’t fall and break your neck.”
“I never have. Any news on the Johnson boy?”
Bourke, who had started to pace, froze in a listening attitude.
“We’re combing the entire southwest,” Forest said. “Roadblocks on every highway out of the state. One definite lead: the Chrysler you found Lemp in was bought off a Third Street lot in December by a man named Kerry Snow. Checks with Kerry Smith. No description, but we have a line on the salesman that sold it to him. What’s at your end?”
“Bourke here put me onto a friend of Lemp’s, a girl named Molly Fawn. You’d better come and talk to Bourke yourself.”
“I intend to. Can he be trusted?”
“For our purposes, I’d say yes. He’s right beside me.”
“Send him out of the room.”
“It’s his room. He seems legitimate.”
“Thank you veddy much,” Bourke said at my back.
Forest was saying, darkly: “You never can tell about these private operators. The dirt they work in is always rubbing off on them. Well, put him back on the line, will you please?”
Bourke answered further questions, about himself and Molly Fawn and Lemp. Finally, I gathered, he was instructed to wait in his office for Forest. He promised to, and hung up.
The dialogue with authority had sobered and tired him, deepening the worry lines in his face. “He wants you to wait, too, Mr. Cross.”
“I don’t think I will. You’d better.”
“More woe,” he said lugubriously. “I haven’t had a piece of luck this year. My luck’s got to turn some time. You know this Forest?”
“I talked to him today. He’s not going to bite you.”
“That’s what you think. I’m in this thing up to my eyes.” He raised a stiff left hand to his left cheekbone. “You didn’t tell me it was the Johnson kid.”
“I didn’t know you’d be interested.”
“I’m not. I want to forget it. I want to go out in the desert and crawl in a gopher hole and forget everything. Only I can’t.”
“Let’s have the rest of it, Bourke. You might as well.”
“Don’t worry. You don’t catch me concealing evidence.”
“Blurt it out,” I said. “You’re wasting time.”
He circled the desk and sat down weakly in the swivel chair behind it. “This Johnson dame a friend of yours?”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“I know her. Know her husband, that is. He was one of my clients. What’s the old guy’s name?”
“Abel. He isn’t so old.”
“Too old for her. That’s not my opinion, it’s his. He came in here six-seven months ago, caught my ad in the paper. I told you about the jealous wives. There are also the jealous husbands.”
A whistling wind swept the region behind my eyes. In the ensuing blankness, something heavy and solid gathered. It felt like a headache. Then I discerned that it was shaped like a woman. But its face was blank, and its lower half was hidden.